In 1981, the Danish filmmaker Jorgen Leth invited artist Andy Warhol to his New York studio to film a short scene which focused on Andy eating a hamburger. If you haven’t seen it, watch it now. Through this film, we see an otherwise ordinary activity reinterpreted as art. A gesture not unlike Duchamp’s fountain.

A little over a year ago, Elliot Cable began a similar experiment. He began collecting and contributing various code snippets to dribbble (an invite only, show and tell site for designers). Elliot later commented on his “shots”:

I know Dribbble isn’t Forrst. I’m not posting my code as code, I’m posting it as visual art. I consider source code a medium for artistic expression, hence why I’m posting my work here in this way. I’ll be trying to post shots from various languages / markups, in various styles; anything I consider to be visually interesting. I also may be adjusting the highlighting and typography to make the shots more visually appealing.

Alexis Sellier, Martin Aumont, myself and a handful of others have taken a similar position to Elliot. But it’s sad to see how often code-as-art is villainized in the face of traditional, idiomatic coding styles.

Projects with the most radically unique styles often have the highest internal standards for code quality and consistency. People put so much thought into the written code itself that it actually engenders a new sort of pride. A pride not just in the function of the code, but in its aesthetics. What’s more, it’s precisely this pride in the “look” of code and the consistency of code within a project, that’s often sadly absent in many otherwise amazing engineers today.

When Isaac Schlueter decides to indent his blocks 20 columns, and Alex Maccaw begins aligning his equal signs, and Dustin Diaz uses a comma first style–there is no need to be upset.

It’s not meant to disvalue these conventions. It’s not meant to sling mud, or thumb noses. It’s an artistic gesture. And it should be applauded.